What we see is, for example, if people have several sources of meaning and they're all from self-actualization, they report as much meaningfulness as people who have no source of meaning. mere concern about myself is not enough for meaningfulness, interestingly. Hi, everyone. It's good to see you again.
Today, I'm here with Dr. Tatiana Schnell. She's currently a professor of existential psychology at MF in Norway, and she is also the founder of the Existential Psychology Lab at the University of Innsbruck. Her research primarily focuses on existential issues such as meaning in life, attitudes toward death and suffering, alienation.
religious spiritual and secular worldviews and their practical significance for individuals organizations society and the environment so all together um i don't know if she would say this but i would consider her an expert in The Psychology of Existential Meaning in Life. And she also has a book called The Psychology of Meaning in Life, Insights and Applications.
Highly recommend it for anyone interested in understanding what a meaningful life looks like, what comprises meaning and what it means to experience and also work through a crisis of meaning. I also really enjoyed the kind of seamless incorporation of philosophical pondering with empirical studies. And I really liked that. Know thyself.
kind of section that was placed at the end of each chapter just to encourage the reader to really reflect on how they could apply what they learned about their lives. And I guess before we get into the details of your research, it might be useful to explore exactly what existential psychology is. So some might think of some existential psychotherapist, Rolo May, Urban Yalom.
Others might think of the existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Beauvoir. I guess I would just like to ask, firstly, what does it mean to study existential psychology? Yes, first of all. Thanks for having me, Ben. I'm happy to be here. Hi to everyone. Yeah, what is existential psychology? Actually, there is not a real subject like that that has already set its boundaries.
I don't know of anyone who has such a professorship on existential psychology. So it's a bit still in the making, the idea what it is. And of course, many of us think of philosophy first, or we think of... psychotherapy, existential psychotherapy. But what existential psychology is, for example, as some colleagues in TMT have done terror management theory to connect existential topics with empirical research.
And I'm doing that by trying to include philosophy as far as possible and to also take a transdisciplinary perspective to... go beyond psychology wherever it is necessary, but to try and remain in that paradigm that is... both empirical but also tries to have a hermeneutical a phenomenal logical perspective which takes into account philosophy and of course there are all those names that you have mentioned starting from
Kierkegaard, as they say in Norway, and then we have Heidegger and Sartre de Beauvoir and many others who would play into it nowadays. So it is... connecting all these ideas with topics that are constitutive of the human condition. What does it mean to be human? And the special focus here, which is different from other branches of psychology, is that of subjectivity.
What does it mean to us as human beings to be, to suffer, to know of our death, to encounter absurdity, to try to find meaning? This video is sponsored by Incogni. Just behind your computer screen sits what is known as a data broker. These shady figures of the cyber underworld sell your data to businesses and marketing agencies so that they can continually target you with more spam and more opportunities for them to get your data.
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Use code Sisyphus at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan at incogni.com slash Sisyphus. Thanks Incogni for sponsoring this video. Yeah, I think that was an excellent description. So kind of moving on to the main... Point of your area of research you've conducted extensive research on meaning and this idea of the crisis of meaning How would you define meaning in life from a psychological perspective? Yeah, that's a big question and I'd like to spend some time on it. First of all,
If you look at what meaning means, we should maybe start with that before we come to the question of meaning in life. I work with a definition of meaning which is subjective, which views... experiences of meaning as an attribution, something that we... perceive in a situation like this or in a in an um characteristic in an object whatever or in life it is something that we perceive as being there or not being that dependent on who we are where we are
what we have experienced so far. So that means this understanding of meaning is a dynamic understanding. It's something that can change. It is subjective and it is relational. Me as a person, I relate to this situation now, to this glass, to whatever we refer to and consider it as more or less meaningful. And if we then take that understanding to ask, so what is that meaning in life?
That is also the subjective understanding of me in my current situation. When stepping back, taking a matter perspective, do I consider my life worth living? Is it meaningful to me? And that is nothing we can determine from the outside. We might say there is an objective meaning in life, and some philosophers are trying to achieve that. But we all...
are situated in certain cultural environments. We are socialized, educated in different ways. So it is actually quite difficult to have an objective understanding here. And like most empirical researchers, we work with a subjective understanding. So that will be the first point. Shall I just continue? You want to come in? Well, because I guess there's a few different ways to tackle this question. I guess kind of, first of all, I'm curious about this claim.
that I see sometimes of kind of we have an intrinsic drive towards meaning, kind of like you just mentioned. There seems to be some importance that we place on. viewing our lives as significant. And I'm curious about your thoughts on that. And if you see that, just come up in research, just the significance of meaningfulness or perceiving meaningfulness itself.
Yeah, that's a good question. And for a long time, when people started doing some research on meaning in life, which has only flourished in the last decades, but in the beginning, people assumed...
mainly based on Viktor Frankl, that the search for meaning is what drives human beings. And if that search is frustrated, then people... turn towards um he suggested um get into a an existential vacuum which means they turn towards addiction or aggression and then might develop a neurogenic neurosis, a neurosis based on spiritual or existential.
problems but when when i started doing empirical research i developed a questionnaire which allowed to measure meaningfulness and crisis of meaning separately assuming that they might be two independent constructs or phenomena and what we found was indeed that there were quite many people who did not see their lives as meaningful, but they were not in a crisis of meaning either. And we call that a state of existential indifference. And it was...
Well, I started that research like 20 years ago or more than 20 years ago, the beginning of the millennium. And it was in Germany. We had representative studies and then one third of the population. according to their answers on the questionnaire, they would be counted as being in a situation of existential indifference. That has changed significantly in the last years. much less of existential indifference. We can talk about that in a while, why that might be. But that shows...
we can live without meaning and it is not something that then bothers us in a very conscious way. It is a situation that is not as... healthy and fulfilled as we see in many ways compared to or as meaningfulness, but it is possible to live without meaning, without suffering. That's very interesting because, yeah, there is like some people that strongly claim that meaning is like a necessity in life. In self-determination theory, I know that there was some debate over.
it being considered like a basic psychological need. the the researchers argue that no it's not it's it's it's maybe more of like an outcome or a product of something but it's not in itself a need even though it's still very like important um so it's interesting that you found you know people can live in a state of existential indifference. And I do want to go back to that at some point. But it is also making me think of kind of the distinction between happiness and meaningfulness.
that people may sometimes claim i don't really need to live like a meaningful life where i have you know maybe a legacy or i'm working towards something but i can i can just live happily i can live in a state of maybe sort of sort of more hedonia than eudaimonia as aristotle would define it i'm wondering how you may be distinguished between the two if there is a meaningful distinction
Yeah, and that distinction is really important and we see it in many people that they don't really believe that there is a distinction. And it is, if you're not on a... on a cognitive level or approaching it from a cognitive perspective, you might think, okay, meaning is something good, isn't it? Everyone is searching for it, so it must be good. And something that's good feels good.
And what are good feelings? They are what we normally call happiness. In psychology, we define happiness as the presence of good feelings and the absence of negative feelings. yeah if meaning is good it should feel good but does it and it is when we then look at research um it is quite a difference between meaning and happiness and also searching for meaning and searching for happiness comes with completely different results. But let's look at the distinction between both first.
As I said, happiness is good feelings. It is emotions, affections. It's momentary. We can't be happy all the time, then we wouldn't notice it anymore that we're happy. So it is something that we sometimes are, sometimes not. That is quite different with meaning. If we have a meaning in life, it is much more stable. And there are many studies that have replicated that.
And when you wake up in the morning, you might feel, oh, I feel happy today. You could also say, oh, I feel sad, I feel bored, I feel worried. But you usually don't wake up and think, oh, I feel so meaningful today, do you? And that is, I don't know, there is... Usually we know from immersion science that all kinds of emotions, they have their mimics. So, I mean, you show me a very friendly face right now. People would probably...
see that from different cultures, they would say he's a friendly guy. If we show an angry face, that's also quite obvious. But then what is a meaningful face? Could you show me a meaningful face? I guess, yeah, it's like maybe I'm thinking somebody who's serious or it's more profound, but that's hard to sometimes differentiate between angry versus stoic. It doesn't have the same emotional... If we use emotions to communicate our inner state, it doesn't really have the same effect.
Yes, or maybe it does, but it depends on what we are actually just doing that's meaningful for us. And if we then maybe later on also talk more about sources of meaning, there are so many of them. We found a large variety. And you can find meaning in having fun, in achievement, in creativity, in spirituality, in nature relatedness, in community.
And all these things take us to different situations. And in those different situations, we experience other things. For example, when I'm having fun with really good friends, I hope I'm not only serious and profound, but that I'm really also emotionally having fun. In other situations, I might be in a situation that I... um realize someone is in trouble and someone is bothering someone else and i walk by and i think okay i should interfere here
Because I think it's not right to do that. So if I do that, I'm very anxious perhaps or worried and so on. And still I find it meaningful. So there's a large variety of things we find meaningful.
All these come with different emotions when they are authentic. So there is not one distinct emotion connected to meaningfulness. And that is quite an important insight if we search for meaning and then... think okay so now where is that profoundness or the seriousness or the happiness um that's not how you find it instead it's more like when you search for um When you search for meaning, it's good to have a clear understanding of
what people actually experience when they say my life is meaningful and here we see that they report they have a sense of coherence things in my life they fit together they have a sense of direction I know about the way the direction i want to take in my life i don't have to have it all planned out goal by goal but to have a broad direction
I need to have a sense of significance to notice I matter, I'm being seen. If I'm doing something, it has consequences. If I'm not doing... anything it also has consequences and finally there's this existential um experience of belonging which means i have a place in this world somewhere i am part of something that's bigger than just myself, I can connect to something. It might be friends, it might be nature, it might be an ideology or a religion.
And these four experiences, they are not per se good feelings. They are more basic. And if we have an understanding that that is what brings meaning about, then it's much easier to know what to search for. So these different sources of meaning, coherence, purpose, significance, belonging, are these like they're more cognitive than they are emotional? Would that be a... a way to characterize them well we call them experiences and experiences are the whole thing of um emotions um
interacting with cognitions, with action, with relations. It's all that happens. But it's actually important to say that meaning... seems to demand some thinking, some kind of cognitive clarity, some reflection. And it's about the question, what... Do I find important, relevant, right with regard to values, with regard to what is a good life, what is a good person? And for that, I can't just feel it. I need to reflect on it. So at least at some point, that reflection should have taken place.
And then I can experience meaning not necessarily by thinking all the time, but by acting on that clarity that I have gained by reflecting. And maybe other people are wondering this too. Do some sources of meaning have a stronger impact on well-being than others? Does it kind of differ across age? Does it differ across demographic? Or is it...
Should we just maximize these sources of meaning or is it more about striking a balance between them? I'm kind of curious what your research has showed regarding this. Yes, maybe... start with a start. When I started trying to identify sources of meaning, it was when we hardly knew anything about it. And people said, well, that's obvious, isn't it? It's religion, go to theology. What do you want in psychology?
But then, at least in Western countries, in Europe, churches were quite empty. And still people went about their lives and they seemed to have things to do. They were committed. They were engaged. I said, okay, I am going to start without any hypothesis to research what it is that gives meaning to people. So I used a grounded theory approach and several different methodologies to inquire, to observe, to listen to discussions and in interviews to find out what is it that gives meaning to people.
And the variety was large, as I already said, and we found 26 sources of meaning. And after operationalizing them and questionnaires, they can be... ordered by factor analysis by five dimensions so that makes it a bit easier to tell about them so one that of that dimension of these dimensions is about myself itself actualization it's what many people go for today
what are your potentials, optimize them. But then there is, of course, also what many people think of when you ask them what gives meaning to your life. The first thing most people come up with is friendships or family. We also have that in relationships and being in good relation with yourself and the close ones. Then there is one dimension that is often overlooked, but it showed empirically.
which we call order or security. It's more about conserving what we have. It's about tradition, morality, reason and practicality. And that seems to be getting more and more important in insecure times. And finally, there's what we call self-transcendence. And that is a dimension of meaning where you... You don't consider your immediate needs and gains, but do something for something bigger.
And that something bigger can either be a higher reality vertically, for example, in religiosity or spirituality. But you can also do that in the here and now, for example, by social commitment, generativity. to relatedness and so on. And of course, that's a huge range of very, very different sources of meaning. And as you wondered, are they all the same? And could I just say, okay, I pick one of them.
uh fun and that's my meaning in life does it work like that well no it doesn't um what we see is for example if people have several sources of meaning and they're all from self-actualization they report as much meaningfulness as people who have no source of meaning. So this mere concern about myself is not enough.
for meaningfulness interesting interestingly and as you already suggested what is important here is that we have several and that these are balanced we see that at least three of these five dimensions should be present in our lives which can be explained quite well also with role theory if we are involved in life in different ways we also experience ourselves in different ways different facets of ourselves come
um to the fore and we are in yeah we are involved in many different um different areas and different concerns which plays into that um general sense which is very close to meaningfulness. It's this sense of, I am part of this all. I am involved, I'm engaged, and that is a sense of, okay, that makes sense what I'm doing.
okay so yeah it's it's that kind of harmony or um not just putting all of it into like one kind of you know i can imagine somebody they really want to like self self-improve or but then maybe they neglect like relationships or something like that so it's good to kind of kind of not just you know yeah it's like similar concepts like self-complexity
with that like kind of self-concept clarity that people talk about where you're i don't know how similar the concepts are just it kind of reminds me of them um but i i i want to just go back because you also mentioned generativity and i remember in the book there is like that is an area that's kind of discussed um a lot
And I've always been interested in the concept of generativity coming from Erickson's kind of social developmental theory that it's usually when people are a bit older and it's that idea of, you know.
wanting the best for like people around you even when you're not going to be around and trying to kind of have this like impact and to me that makes sense as as being strongly associated with meaningfulness but I'm kind of curious what sort of research sticks out in this relationship between generativity and meaning in life. Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. We saw in very different samples and studies that generativity had
The best better weights and multiple regression, to put it statistically, it was a real good predictor of meaningfulness. And not only among that age group that you mentioned and that Ericsson had in mind, when he said okay when everything is settled I've got my house my car my family then i can also think ahead and forget about myself for a bit but we found it among people who were in treatment for mental health problems as well as unhealthy people
in young people as well as in older people and in very different cultures in many different countries. So this generativity was always on top of the best meaning makers. And that was really interesting.
the age aspect is especially as you mentioned with ericsson he said well maybe something for later age and um there was a an interesting study that showed um when it comes to generativity at the workplace, that younger people don't so often perceive generativity as something that makes their work meaningful. But they had an interesting addition in their study. They asked people how old they were, but also how old they considered themselves.
And when they then use their subjective age, then suddenly generativity correlated much more highly with meaningful work, which... seems to show that you need a certain maturity in young age in order to have a sense of why generativity should be something good. And yeah, there might be many people still on the lookout and exploring life who have other things in mind, which is okay. I mean, we all take different paths through our life.
and yes but um so it's not um as frequent in young age but it is a strong meaning maker also in young age if you have that um if you are able to are willing to take that perspective to go beyond yourself it's making me think of maybe younger people and people of all ages when they get involved in
like social justice movements or they get kind of politically involved. Do you see a relation, a relationship between meaningfulness in life and activism and, you know, social movements yes uh we see a strong connection there and it is again um a finding that shows how meaningfulness and well-being and happiness are quite different. Because also in interviews, but you also see it quantitatively, people who are politically or ecologically involved, they see a strong meaning in what they're doing.
but often they are not feeling well at all doing that because they don't really see the immediate consequences. They do a lot of work and even if it's... seems to be futile they say how could I not do it because it's so obvious it has to be done so the meaning is there very clearly but There's no well-being, but still they do it.
And, yeah, it is theoretically interesting to distinguish, again, meaning and happiness. But it also shows us that we need to take care of people who are willing to give so much for a cause. and then personally suffer from that. And that is also a side of meaning that we see in various kinds of engagement also in... monetary work where people find it extremely meaningful what they do are willing to self-exploit.
I think that's a very concrete example of what we were talking about earlier about the kind of distinction between happiness and meaning that these individuals that are involved in these movements. might not necessarily be experiencing a lot of happiness, but they could be experiencing a lot of meaningfulness and that this is still like a significant thing that should be measured and understood.
i guess moving on from that that there might be some people where they are not really experiencing happiness or meaningfulness um many who watch this channel many who seek treatment for mental health issues they suffer kind of a disorientation and alienation with the world and themselves. Sometimes people call this an existential crisis. Sometimes it is elevated to a level of, you know, a diagnosable disorder.
um i've also just heard kind of more generally people refer to this as a crisis of meaning they can refer to this on like kind of a social level of just like society is having a crisis of meaning or on the more individual level, kind of similar to Frankl's neurosis idea. And you've also looked into this idea of a crisis of meaning.
i guess i would like to ask what does it mean to experience a crisis yes the crisis of meaning is um when people have an absence of meaning in their life but they actually would like to have a meaningful life and they don't know how to reach that state of being. And we see that it is connected with suffering. And it is phenomenologically a situation that can be described as the ground beneath your feet isn't stable anymore.
or maybe it has never been stable, but you don't know what you're actually, you are not aware why you live this life, why you do what you do. You don't have a secure grounding in this. You lack significance, coherence, belonging or direction. And it is associated with depression, with anxiety. You lose a lot of resources, even if beforehand you were some very strong person, completely self-assured in a crisis.
meaning which can hit people in all times of life even if they before were very healthy and fit they then report i don't have access anymore to my Self-regulation capacities. My self-efficacy is gone. I don't have a sense of internal control anymore and so on. It is really like the world is crumbling.
But what I'd like to add is it sounds bad. It sounds like... a problem but it's not a diagnosis and very often it seems that people are depressed and feeling bad or feeling bad or anxious and then they quite easily turn towards psychological diagnosis which perhaps aren't really psychological problems but just quite normal experiences of facing existence which naturally has an effect like that when you for the first time
look existence in the eye in the sense of understanding that there is absurdity there is suffering i'm going to die that um yeah it destroys or it makes the ground beneath our feet crumble and that is absolutely normal but so seldom we talk about it and people in such a situation often think I'm the only one in this world who experiences something so strange so something must be very wrong with me maybe I'm ill
Yeah, I recall when I was probably the age when most people go through this, I felt very alone, just like facing all of these existential thoughts, the absurdism. And that's when I started reading philosophy and I was starting to become interested in psychology because you realize that there's a vast amount of literature that shows that other people...
have experienced this similar thing. And then maybe you can develop the language to articulate these kinds of questions. And you realize there are people around you that have experienced a similar thing, that these are very commonplace.
kind of uh i was going to say conundrums but sometimes more than that just just uh real like you know grappling with existential issues and i guess it does make me wonder about your thoughts on kind of the the use of like existential psychotherapy um like therapy that is more specific to grappling with these existential issues Yeah, first of all, let me say what an effort it takes to find out that other people have such experiences. If you need to read up on it.
don't hear so easily among friends and if it's not yeah part of our normal life so and similarly i would advocate for not necessarily turning towards a therapist for that because as I said and as many philosophers said this is a part of life and it if we then say, yeah, it's of course good to have existential therapy, but we shouldn't pathologize that experience. So... Although existential psychotherapy is something very valuable, especially if you have mental health problems,
Problems like existential crisis or crisis of meaning, they should be something that we are able to deal with in society. But for that, we need a quite different society. compassionate community who's willing to recognize human beings are always in conundrums. Life is paradox. It's full of absurdity.
don't know the largest part of it at all. So admit that we are, that we'll make, that we'll... make errors, that we will fail, that we become guilty, that we will never be able to do everything right, that we are vulnerable. Instead, we see that a culture of absolute strength and the survival of the fittest or the bully is winning. And that is such an easy option out in the crisis of meaning of more.
So even perhaps in existential indifference, if there's someone who tells you very clearly and loudly that's how life is and that's what truth is and you don't have to think about it twice, then... Yeah, that can be an easy way out of these troubles and that crisis, but it's not one that will result in a meaningful, authentic life. Yeah, I'm really curious when you mentioned that there's these differing trends in existential indifference, and I'm wondering kind of...
How prevalent is this crisis of meaning in modern times? And are there particular circumstances unique to the 21st century that if there is a difference that can explain this difference? Yeah, what we saw is that the number of crises of meaning, The people who reported crisis of meaning has been rising in the last 20 years from 4% in the beginning of the millennium to 14% currently.
But then if we look at the different age groups, we see that among 18 to 29-year-olds, more than one-fourth of them report a crisis of meaning. These are young people like you. who see that this life is critical in different ways. There have always been crises, but right now there is... all these crises like the climate crisis, like wars, like financial problems, social, polarized.
polarization and so on they come quite close and it's not so easy to lean back and say oh i don't care i remain in indifferent um But it's possible. There are one-fourth of the youth who say, wow, that really questions me and my foundation. I need to address that, as you did. But then there are many others who say, okay, I don't care. I can also live by ignoring that and don't take it so easily. So that is also possible.
There is no automatic connection between something dangerous happening outside and people getting a crisis of meaning. It's always about... How am I perceiving it? Am I allowing it to touch me, to question me? And it doesn't always do that. Not everyone is in a situation. where they are also able to do it because sometimes we are so busy with earning enough money or having other problems that it might be right not to also question the ground beneath our feet.
But at some point, as for example Heidegger said it, at some point we should all realize that just living as one lives. is not real living, is not authentic living, is not the living according to me. At some point, we should realize, so what is it actually that I find right and important? that phase of reflection is often a very painful one because I will notice, oh, maybe beforehand I just did what everyone did. And that's quite different.
And that's not true what everyone does or what everyone believes. And so changing basic assumptions is painful. But it gives us an access to a life that is really perceived as authentic and people who are forced into such a situation often through that. through serious diseases and diagnosis also in the middle of life or later on, they sometimes say, I never had the chance to reflect like that.
on my life now it gives me some time to breathe i'm allowed to stop and i realize until now my life has been lived But I'm not willing to do that anymore. I want to be the director of my life from now on and I will change my priorities and live my life myself. And it is that phase that...
is really important in order to... It is quite important to accept that such a crisis... questions me and is painful because it then opens the door to a different way of living i quite like the idea of recognizing these um these crises of meaning not as like pathological issues that are inherent to the person but more so avenues for potential change and kind of re-questioning things I do kind of wonder with just you know
people feeling very overwhelmed at times with the speed of modern life and digital culture and trends. Do you think technology and social media are eroding meaning or? do you think it can enhance it maybe by like when you go through these these crises you you can actually reach out to people and communicate more easily but then at the same time it's it's things are happening so quickly, it feels like the actual sources of meaning are potentially being challenged.
I imagine that you might answer that question even better than I can. But let me first answer and then maybe you can add something to it. We also did some studies on that and others did too. And the idea was, oh, I'm being on the internet, social media, and so it must be really bad. for you and there are many many reasons to say that it's especially if you get addicted to some kind of social media and if you think that is reality
although it's filtered and faked and so on. But what we see is there are also ways of using social media and the web wisely, as you say, by connecting to others.
If you also have other ways of living, if it doesn't take you out of the real life in a way that enhances it, it's a complementary way of engaging with this world. That seems to... be what the data show what is your impression uh i would i would agree i think that using it as a as a tool is important i think it would be um naive to just like
throw it away like this is very uh useful technology especially in terms of allowing us to connect but then making sure that that doesn't become our whole world or our whole reality i think you mentioned like when people do go through this crisis it is it is tempting to just plunge further into just maybe kind of you know some form of escapism or just finding like another life elsewhere um and
That is where I get a little bit. I mean, I've always been kind of... scared of that idea of baudrillard's like hyper reality where like um things that are virtual become more real than reality itself and start actively informing it and we kind of have a
crisis of symbols and understanding what things mean. And, you know, it does feel sometimes we're reaching this kind of point of disorientation. But I am hopeful that... at the same time we we could use this technology and i've seen it to increase connection increase a sense of understanding with each other increase communication But it just it takes that little bit of extra effort that is up to the individual fundamentally to really make that change.
Yeah, but it's not so easy, is it, given the algorithms and how easily they transport you into a bubble. And we see that nowadays radicalization processes are happening so quickly. People, yes, often act upon their radicalized views. more and more. We see it in Europe with several terror attacks. We're also going to do some research on that topic in the next...
Yes. So that is particularly dangerous that even if you are careful as a user, there are means of... taking you somewhere where you even don't notice that your view of reality is narrowed very much and shaped by certain ideologies behind the algorithms. I guess from that, I would like to ask people, I guess, in my age range that are using social media a lot, both for...
maybe good, but then also some escapism. And they are experiencing that crisis of meaning, that lack of a sense of direction or coherence. For someone who feels lost or struggles with meaning, what practical steps would you suggest to help them cultivate it? Yeah, the first step is... What they probably already do when they're just listening to this, it is getting a clearer understanding of who am I and who do I want to be.
clarify my why's and why am i doing what i'm doing is it something i really agree with and Is it in line with my values and what are my values? And these are questions that we are not often educated in. i don't know how it is in canada or in the us at least in many european schools this is not a subject who am i what are my values and if you don't If you're not lucky to have parents who discuss it with you, who get into that discourse with you, where do we...
find out about it. So if you are in a situation where you are in a crisis of meaning, I'd like to say congratulations. Wow, you are actually facing something. worthwhile and the fact that you're in a crisis of meaning means you're suffering from not having meaning you're suffering from that because you have the idea that there could be meaning how nice
There are people who just don't care. They just do what is good for them. They're opportunistic. They're conformist. They just do what the others do. They don't care. But if you have a sense that life could be different. then there is so much potential, even if it's painful, first of all, to experience it. So try to understand why are you suffering? Usually a crisis of meaning. phenomenologically means I realized that life
is different from what I thought it was. It's about basic assumptions being shattered. It is often so-called positive illusions like everything will work out fine. Death is far away. Oh, I'm better than others. I have everything under control. These are so-called positive illusions in psychology because they make us feel good and they give us security, at least in the short term. But then if something happens or if I start questioning,
maybe that is not true, then that is quite painful when they dissolve. But then the task is, okay, what is life then, if I look at it realistically? And that is the first step to find out what would I like life to be? How is it? And what can I do to reach that understanding of what a meaningful life is?
and first of all that's a quite a lot of reflection and it's good to have someone at your side here it doesn't have to be a psychotherapist it can be a good friend family relatives it can be um someone from church it can be practical philosopher or a coach um but you can also go through that on your own if necessary if you're an introvert but um yes that is the first thing
And the next step is then, okay, when you have an idea what that could be, do something. Get out of yourself. Get out of your thoughts. act upon it and that is when you start experiencing because meaning is nothing that you detect at one point after you've been thinking about it for two and a half months suddenly it's there
It's not like that. It's more like having the clarity and then starting to act upon it by doing what you find important. And then you can just trust that at some point when you act upon that. The sense of, okay, that is meaningful, what I'm doing will come up. But don't forget, it's not a feeling that then suddenly will be all around you. It's more like a way of living that shows in you're motivated to do what you do and you have a sense that you don't have to bend. That's you.
You have decided to do that. Yeah, no, that's very, I think that's going to be very useful for a lot of people. I think especially just taking that. like kierkegaard says like leap of faith um from i mean in this case from thought to action can be quite difficult because it is hard when you're really in it to to have a sort of you know, sense of trust or belief that doing these things will actually amount to some sense of direction. But that is why I guess like the, the reflection.
aspect of the first part of it is so important it is really gathering information in terms of you know what does bring meaning what does this mean um i i recall in the book that uh one of the tasks used in some of the studies is is that kind of card sorting task with the different values and i i was wondering if you thought that would be
First of all, if you could explain it a bit more, but if you thought that it would be useful, maybe especially in that initial stage where people are just trying to figure out, you know, their values have been illuminated and maybe like shown to be not as... useful or meaningful as they once thought, how do they then figure out what they do perceive as meaningful or what they do care about?
Yes, it's actually not so easy to find out what we care about. These sources of meaning, they are interwoven with our upbringing and everything. So to get access to them is not easy. That's why we also developed this card method. You refer to the Sources of Meaning card method, and it seems to be very helpful.
is and we don't call them values we don't speak about values here because if we have this understanding of values values are per se good no so if you call something a value you don't have to argue for it anymore because that's it and it has it has its authority and then we also see people If you ask them which values they find important, I mean, it's hard to not find a value important. So usually all values are really good. So who would say friendliness or honesty or...
or courage are not really important. They all are. But if you then look at, we also did a study on that, what people actually do, there is quite a value action gap. I find many things important, but my life... looks quite different there is a nice exercise here that i sometimes use a colleague has introduced it and it is take a sheet of paper and write down what have you done last week write down
10 things now take another sheet of paper and write down what are your values sorted or ordered by how important you find them rank them and then compare what you actually did what kind of values did it represent and are the values represented in what you did and it can show you quite clearly that often this is not the case So that's why we talk about orientations, about different sources of meaning, and they are values that are actually put into action.
I find them important and I actually do something. I invest time and energy in them. These sources of meaning, they are put on the cards, 26 of them, as I said, we identified 26, and they have been replicated in several cultures, and they seem to be quite extensive. and complete so you look at those 26 sources of meaning you have a sorting process and then there is a number of questions that you go through usually in the dialogue
When you do that together with the person you trust, and then it is quite easy, in a way, access. You can do it in one hour, and you learn a lot about what your sources of meaning are.
You can read more about it on the somicam.org website. Yeah, I think that's going to be very useful because there are a lot of programs out there that they do... tell you to just write down your values but then it's not always like enough like it's i think it's useful to know that there is some incoherence or dissonance between values and action and
You know, even sometimes calling something of value can affect how people approach it and, you know, how they assign significance to it. Yeah. Yeah. So it looks like we're approaching an hour. And I feel like we could keep talking. But for the interest of time, I just want to ask one final question. What are some of the biggest unanswered questions in your area of research that you're excited to explore?
Yes, what I'm working on right now is a big question in my view and it is we are always view meaning as something positive and there are so many ways of finding meaning in life and they contradict each other often. and we can find meaning from hating others we find meaning from being part of a group that gives you a sense of belonging that is quite clear in saying that's the direction and you matter but that devalues others. And that means meaning itself.
does not really tell us something about ethics or if we live a good life in for example a democratic way or in a way of understanding what a good life is so we need a second perspective on that and we need to understand okay when is meaning dangerous and when isn't it when is it good and that's something that hasn't been explored much and i'm very interested in
finding out more about it oh that's really cool um well it's been a pleasure talking to you and thank you for um coming on the podcast and i will uh put any relevant links in the description, I believe, your website to maybe help with that card sorting task. That could be one, if there's any other that come to mind. You guys can, yeah, check them out in the description. And any final thoughts just before we end?
Either too many or none. Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Take care. Thank you.